Please don't take my man card. What I'm about to tell you may be upsetting, but I still think I deserve to keep it because I still love war movies. The boilerplate CIA thriller is starting to get really really really really really boring. Also, predictable.
On to the review!
Safe House is 2012's Killer Elite. They both share the idea of a rising star getting together with a known money-maker and trying to give the audience a spy thriller action flick with a twist. Instead of Jason Statham and Robert De Niro working together to piss off Clive Owen, we get Denzel Washington and Ryan Reynolds fighting each other and everyone else.
Ryan Reynolds is Matt Weston, a young CIA agent who gets a good ol' 'shitty first posting' because damnit, he's the FNG. That's just what you do when you're the new guy. You get crappy postings until you prove yourself. Why back in my day I had to guard a safe house under Lake Ontario for two years and they wouldn't even let me have a proper toilet! Of course, Matt doesn't want to be in boring old Cape Town, South Africa. He wants a more exciting posting, like Paris or Detroit.
Conveniently, Denzel Washington's Tobin Frost, a rogue CIA agent who has given the USA all sorts of shit for the last 10 years, gets himself in a bind and has no choice but to turn himself in to the American Consulate in...dun-dun-duuuun...Cape Town! Since it's illegal to waterboard a wanted fugitive on American soil, the powers that be decide to transport Frost to the safe house to milk him for information.
Predictably, this is exactly when things go to shit. The safe house is compromised and Matt has to fight off the guys who want to get Frost. Even better, Matt also has to fight Frost, since he understandably doesn't want to be tortured and probably disposed of. This is the bread and butter of the film, an hour of Frost fucking with Matt's head as they fight off and evade their unidentified tormentors.
The best parts of the movie are when Frost is trying to extricate himself from Matt's grasp. Two scenes in particular were genuinely fun to watch. One finds Matt and Frost in a car chase, with Frost trying to extricate himself from the trunk while they're being chased by three oversized SUV's. The other involves a game of cat and mouse in a huge soccer stadium(football stadium, for everyone in the world who isn't American).
The bummer of the whole movie is that, despite some entertaining set-pieces, Safe House is absolutely boilerplate. There's a mole in the CIA! Someone isn't who they seem to be! They give you three or four people who may be the traitor, then make it painfully obvious as to who it actually is. If you're surprised by the twist then you were probably taken to this movie by your caretakers. I don't know exactly what that means but it implies that you're dumb.
I'm getting sick of the hand-held camera and I'm beyond sick of the thriller-without-thrills. Safe House could have been a tense, entertaining action movie. Unfortunately, it's exactly like the last dozen CIA movies before it. It seems that Denzel Washington is typecasting himself into his Man on Fire persona. Ryan Reynolds is trying very hard to keep himself from being pigeonholed as a comedic actor, but he doesn't bring the nuance that he brought to Buried. Basically, you can do better with your money. Go watch The Grey or just read a Tom Clancy novel. I will say that it's better than Killer Elite, but you'd probably enjoy any of the Bourne films much more.
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